Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 5630380" data-attributes="member: 85870">First, I apologize if my earlier samples came across as insulting, or insinuated that anyone actually played 4e in the manner described. They were extreme cases, but extreme to demonstrate the point--that when carried to a certain logical extension, there are "fissures," or "cracks between the lines," inherent in narrative resolution playstyle. The choice to carry forward, or not carry forward, any particular scene-based narrative resolution has ancillary consequences. Those consequences may run counter 4e's inherent paradigms, and they may have relatively little applicability to actual in-game play. But for me, the principle involved alters my opinion just as much as the potential for any particular effect to occur--or not occur--in actual use. That said, as long as you're willing to accept the basic tenets of narrative resolution, for the first time since it was released 3 years ago, I can actually cognitively understand and recognize how some players enjoy 4e, and find that it provides a satisfying play experience. For that, I'm actually grateful to wrecan, pemerton, and the others for being willing to engage in dialogue. I'm not totally willing to concede, at this point, that the concept of dissociation is not "inherent," or "objective"--but I'm pretty close. More appropriately, if it any mechanic can be proven to be "inherently dissociated," its actual applicability in any objective case would likely be so far removed from being useful, that it's pointless. I'm sure any of us could come up with something objectively dissociative--"Mars Attacks"At-Will, melee, Magic1W + special "Every time you hit something with your sword, aliens from Mars appear overhead in a UFO, and add 2d6 of damage with a laser beam." <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />But at that point the distinction between "dissociation," "crappy mechanics," and "general idiocy" becomes nigh indistinguishable. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> (And even then, the dissociation of "Mars Attacks" is still subjectively based in the genre expectations of heroic fantasy....)However, I want to reiterate something I said in a previous post, which is that even if something is subjective/not universal, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or provides zero utility. I think the quote by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1964 about obscenity applies here: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I  understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ['dissociative mechanics']; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing  so. But I know it when I see it."I also think we should be careful in criticizing Justin Alexander too much. To be fair, it's a little bit more than that. The stated the premise might be, "4e contains a number of mechanics of a general meta-game nature, caliber, tone and timbre, that when applied through a shared association of inherent property or 'state of being,' rather than narratively, will tend to deviate or break from that shared association. This I have termed dissociative." It's a question of the form of association--is it through shared  fiction, or  through inherent property or "state of  being"? There's really two reasons I'm not 100% willing to concede the objectivity point--one, I'm still not completely sold on the idea that narrative resolution can always be left behind scene to scene. At some level, in some fashion, there's going to be a point where a narrative resolution is going to have to be adjudicated and "mapped," as tomBitonti stated.The other reason I'm not willing to totally write off objective dissociation is because there's lots of assumptions being bandied about here about the nature of "narrative" that is undefined as well. That, however, is most certainly a subject for another thread.</blockquote>

Verification